Newsletter

January 2004

REBs and the Forest Industry

Clive Seligman

Ian Scott and
Cheryl Wilson (2003) investigated the Research Ethics Boards (REBs) of
medical
schools acrossCanada.
They found that different REBs required
dramatically different numbers of copies of the research ethics
protocol to be
submitted for approval.

For example,
REBs
inNewfoundland andLabrador
required 11 copies of the ethics application,Manitoba 15,
andBritish Columbia
20.The correlation between the number
of copies requested and the longitude of the location of the faculty of
medicine was statistically significant (0.75).
Interestingly, there was also a statistically significant
correlation
(0.65) found between the number of copies requested by the REBs and the
“annual
cut of trees for each province that has a medical school.”

The results
apparently startled the authors who speculated that the findings “may
point to
a tacit or not-so-tacit agreement between the forestry industry and
REBs.Is it the job of ethics boards to
create
demand for paper to support the forest industry?These
authors would suggest not. Such an
association must stop, and we would suggest that any and all
communication
between REBs and the forest industry cease.”
Politically astute to the dangers involved in their subversive
report,
the authors conclude their article with the hope “that by uncovering
this
startling break of ethical behaviour that they will not suffer any
delays or
undue rejections by REBs in the future.”

On the
assumption
that this report is not simply pulp fiction, SAFS agrees with the
authors that
the REBs are barking up the wrong tree.
Accordingly SAFS will set up a new, investigative branch to
follow this
clear-cut violation of ethics by the REBs.

Reference

Scott,I., &
Wilson, C. (2003).Understanding the
number of copies of ethics applications required by faculties of
medicine.Canadian Medical Association
Journal, 169, 1297.